


Every You/Every Me

by AnonymousCatastrophe405



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Canon Compliant, Catharsis, F/F, Gen, IN SPACE!, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-The Raven King, Prom, Rule 63, The Raven King Spoilers, Wings, fairytale AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-08 18:15:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7768165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousCatastrophe405/pseuds/AnonymousCatastrophe405
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I didn’t fall in love with you.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i>I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way.</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we’d choose anyway.</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.</i></p><p> </p><p>Kiersten White, "The Chaos Of Stars"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. somebody somewhere will clean out your wounds

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Some of Us are Looking at the Stars](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1114296) by [autoeuphoric (FreezingRayne)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreezingRayne/pseuds/autoeuphoric). 



> Some of these AUs might get fleshed out more in the future, but largely these are exercises for characterization, worldbuilding, genre bending, character study, and style.

Niall Lynch used to brag, often and many years ago, that his wife was an angel fallen to earth, who stumbled out of the woods and into his arms on a glorious summer day. Aurora would smile tolerantly, as one does when one’s husband is a braggart and a happy liar, and remind whoever was listening, usually her three sons, that their father was telling tales. The angels, she’d say, that live in the woods were not the kinds of angels who stumble out from between the trees and into the arms of braggarts and happy liars, no matter how handsome and charming they thought they were.

Niall Lynch’s family had been one of those fortunate ones to have permission to see the angels, but that fortune was only good for himself. His sons, three boys who each embodied one of their father’s virtues--or vices, depending on who you asked--all badly wanted to be as fortunate as their father one day, as only one of them would be the one who was audience to the angels.

The youngest son was several years younger than his brothers and the most like their mother, an angel in a different sense, and though he wished to see one of the ones in the woods for himself, he was not the sort of boy to desire the responsibilities of running the landhold that belonged to the Lynches since time immemorial. 

The oldest, though heir apparent because he was Niall’s firstborn, was not fond of his father and dreamed of bigger things than overseeing a farm. This son, when he decided he wanted to leave Singer’s Falls and go off to study law and politics and other grand things, forfeited his birthright to become the head of the Lynch household.

The middle son, the most like his father in all the ways that mattered, wanted badly to be like his father in the way that seemed to matter the most, and he spent much of his time among the trees, looking for the angels his father occasionally got to see. Once, when he was so deep into the forest he could see neither the path nor the valley he’d come from, when he was the only human around for many miles, he climbed up onto a rock and, in the fearless way of small boys, he shouted, “I am Ronan Niall Lynch, and I want to see an angel.” 

This was many years ago. 

The angels in the woods were few in number and appropriately flighty things with wings to match the birds that also roosted there. Everyone who lived in the towns and villages that bordered their forest knew of them, and the chance to see one in person drew visitors from many miles around and beyond to each. No one ever got so lucky, though, because the angels only revealed themselves to a handful of people: to the women of a particular house in Henrietta, and to the heads of the oldest families in all the other towns. Why this was, no one could say, except that once, very long ago, in older memories than anyone living possessed, the angels sent emissaries to the people who began to settle around their forest, and the people, who were in the presence of angels, agreed that only the heads of their houses would ever deal with the angels directly. 

It is strange, Ronan thinks, to remember all of this in the middle of the night, when an angel has quite unceremoniously come through his kitchen window. Sitting amongst the broken glass and splintered wood, as the rain poured inside, the angel seems quite unable to get up, as if it can’t orient itself in the room it’s suddenly found itself in. 

“I’m sorry,” it says, clearly badly startled when Ronan appears at the door holding a handgun. It’s shaking, badly, but whether that’s because it’s frightened or injured or cold is unclear. Ronan does not immediately put the gun down, because he is shocked to find an angel bleeding and shedding feathers all over his kitchen tile. One of its wings is badly broken, hanging limply behind it, bent at an awkward angle and clearly very heavy, as the angel’s entire body is listing to one side. 

“It’s fine,” he tells it, even though the damage to his kitchen is decidedly not fine at all. The angel sags, clearly relieved, and Ronan carefully picks his way across the kitchen to the angel’s side. It looks up at him, its eyes catching the lightning outside and reflecting them like a cat’s. It looks at the gun.

“I’m sorry, ” the angel says again. “Where am I?”

“Singer’s Falls,” Ronan says. He can’t figure out how he’s supposed to help it move without injuring it even more. 

The angel sags again, weak or defeated, leaning against the cabinet under the sink. “Are you one of the Lynches?”

“One of them. Niall’s heir.”

The angel makes a weary sound, almost like a laugh. “Oh, thank god.”

With that, it passes out. When Ronan finds the light, he saw that the angel is quite tall, and that he, as in light it seems fair to assume it’s a he, would be impossible to move without help, especially with that broken wing getting in the way. He sighs heavily and tucks the gun into the back of his pajama pants, then goes back upstairs to wake Matthew to help him get the damned thing.

The angel is nearly too big for the couch in the sitting room off the kitchen, his body almost too long and his wings almost too huge to stay up, even with an ottoman pushed up against the couch for them wings to lay on. Ronan sits with it for the rest of the night, picking debris and glass out of its feathers as carefully as he can, and he only disturbs the angel’s sleep a handful of times and gets hit in the face by the unbroken wing only once. 

“I think you’re lucky he didn’t break your nose,” Matthew whispers to him at the kitchen table the next morning.

Ronan rubs at the bruise, wincing at the tenderness of it. “We don’t know for sure if it’s a he yet, Matthew.”

His younger brother frowns and leans over to get a better look. “Well, he looks like a he, and people aren’t ‘its’. I mean, he is a person, right? Kind of?”

“I don’t know. Dad died before he could tell me anything about them.”

They lapse into silence. Matthew gets up for a third helping of eggs and Ronan pours himself more coffee, and another hour passes before the angel starts to stir. Ronan gets up with barely enough of a chance to stop him from stretching his massive wings and taking out half his mother’s old knickknacks in the process.

“Sorry,” the angel says. He sounds like a he, now that there isn’t thunder and pouring rain drowning out his low voice. “I forgot where I was.”

“It’s fine. Can you sit up?” 

The angel manages to get himself onto one of his elbows before crying out, the weight of his broken wing pulling in the wrong direction when he lifts himself up. Matthew appears at Ronan’s side and crouches down in a way that’s probably supposed to be comforting.

The angel touches the place where the wing is coming through his thin, dirty shirt, can probably feel the dried blood on the light fabric. “Something’s torn or broken, I can’t fold it.”

Ronan crouches beside Matthew. The joints of a wing aren’t unlike an arm, and, for the most part, arms only bend one way. Dealing with an arm almost as long as the body it's attached to and full plumage, though, complicate things. With great care, the brothers find places to put their hands that don’t make the angel wince, and very carefully, they fold it closed. The angel moves part of it under his human arm and hugs it to his body, then twists to sit up. There’s a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead and tightness around his eyes, but he seems glad to be upright. 

“Thank you,” he says. With both arms, now, he holds the broken wing even tighter and stands. He needs to slouch considerably under the weight of his wings, but if he didn’t need to he would be almost as tall as Ronan. His wingspan must be massive. He sighs heavily, realizing there simply isn’t enough room for someone with its anatomy in the house. “About last night, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Matthew says. The angel seems unsure how to respond to his sunniness. “Ronan’s done more damage than that on a bender, you’re fine.”

The angel looks at Ronan, eyes a little narrowed and considering. It’s somehow shocking that his eyes are so human. When he looks away, Ronan feels like he’s failed some kind of test. 

“I’m going out,” he says, and with that, he leaves Ronan and Matthew in the sitting room. They can see him moving across the yard, and eventually he stops and looks around. When he seems satisfied with where he’s stopped, he stretches his right wing.

“I wonder what he eats?” Matthew says. “I don’t think--eggs would be kind of inappropriate, right?”

“He has a shitty attitude,” Ronan says. “If he doesn’t want to eat them, he’ll have to deal with that.”

Matthew swats his brother’s arm. “Don’t be a dick, he’s injured and he’s in a strange place. He’s entitled to be in a bad mood.”

“Whatever.” Ronan returns to the kitchen to reheat his coffee. 

\---

The angel, they find out, is named Adam. Ronan’s initial thought is that it’s a very mundane, human name for a member of the Heavenly host. When he voiced this, Adam stared blankly at him and said, very seriously, “the what?”.

It was very disappointing. It’s also disappointing that Adam seems to have little interest in him and is more interested in Matthew, in the house, in the livestock and the property. Ronan tries to not let this bother him, but it does. It’s supposed to be his responsibility, his father’s and his grandfather’s and his great-grandfather’s legacy, and this stubborn, sullen creature has no interest in behaving quite the way he’d expected angels to.

No. Instead, Adam seems more interested in finding places to nap and eating him out of house and home and accidentally breaking things because he has no concept of how to move through a house with thirteen surplus feet of body to maneuver through it. After two days of this and no explanation as to why he’s even here, abusing Ronan’s limited capacity for kindness, Ronan calls on two of his friends and begs them to come and help him get his answers.

“This is very strange,” Blue says. Her family is the one from Henrietta, where all the women who live there have seen and spoken to the angels. “They aren’t supposed to turn up unannounced. He must have a very good reason coming here, they don’t come out of the forest willy-nilly like this.”

“He looks young,” Gansey says. He comes from a city much further away on the other side of the forest. His family isn’t one of the lucky ones, but Gansey is an eccentric and interested in the luck of other people. “They don’t usually let the young ones go, from what I understand.”

Ronan scoffs. “Well, this one’s flown the coop, apparently.”

“I wonder what brought him here. Have you ever seen him before?”

“No,” Ronan tells her. “The only one I’ve seen looks like a little girl, and I always know when she’s coming. There’s a raven that precedes her every time.”

Gansey rubs his lower lip with his thumb. “Are they related, maybe? Do her wings look like his?”

“No. Opal’s are magpie ones, I can’t tell what Adam’s are.”

“Varied trush, I think,” Gansey says.

“Does it matter?”

Blue makes a thoughtful face. “It might, they’re very deliberate. If you’ve only ever seen Opal, there’s a reason for it.”

Ronan’s stomach soured at the thought that something happened to the little girl angel he’s used to seeing. 

“I can hear you,” Adam says, speaking for the first time since Blue and Gansey arrived. He sounds as peevish as he looks, and he seems no less miserable than he did last night, just more annoyed about it. Blue approaches him cautiously, the way one approaches a wild animal, and Adam watches her, wary, as he fussily grooms his unbroken wing. 

“Hi,” she says. “I’m Blue. What’s your name?” He raises a fair eyebrow at her and says nothing, and switches the wing he’s cleaning. He winces badly as he moves the broken one, but in the way that someone used to a hurt does. 

Blue asks, “How long has it been like that?”

“A while.” He doesn’t offer anything more. The feathers on that wing are sparse in places, the skin underneath irritated and sore looking. It twitches every time he touches it, the shiver going through the length of it to where it’s attached to his shoulder. He is trying very hard to not display how much pain he’s clearly in. 

Gansey pulls Ronan out of the angel’s earshot and whispers to him, “I’m no expert, but I don’t think that wing can be fixed.”

“I noticed,” Ronan whispers back. “What does that mean? It gets amputated?”

“I don’t know. I would imagine so. He’s probably done even more damage to it dragging it around like that, it’s probably broken more than once, in at least a few places.”

They exchange a frown. Gansey because he feels badly, and Ronan because he can’t imagine being grounded and short a limb will improve Adam’s disposition any. 

When they return, Blue is sitting on the couch beside him, examining the injured wing. That he’s so readily trusted Blue, rather than Ronan, is irritating and slightly offensive. They look up at Gansey and Ronan with a similarly considering expression on their faces. 

 

“Adam was just telling me what brought him here,” Blue says. 

“I was.” He yanks a broken feather off his wing and barely suppresses the spasm that goes through it. After the pain passes, he nods towards the tarp-covered hole in the wall above the sink. “I don’t exactly fly well, in case you didn’t notice.”

Blue gasps. “You fly with it like this? How?”

“With a lot of difficulty, that’s how.” He pulls his wing away from her and pulls it forward, under his arm, holding it close. The brown feathers are almost same color as his skin, the blue-gray accent ones the same color as his eyes. He looks at Ronan for the first time today. “Opal told me you could help me, with my wing. Is that true?”

Gansey and Ronan exchange a look. Blue manages to get a few words into the silent conversation as well, and Adam appears to sour a little more the longer it goes on. 

“I don’t know,” Ronan admits. Adam’s expression darkens even more. “I can try, I don’t know how, but I can try. Anything would be better than leaving it fucked up like that.”

Blue glares at him, disapproving of his choice of words, and Gansey seems uneasy, which is to say that he looked very much like himself, but a little tight around the eyes and mouth. Adam’s expression stays stony for a few seconds longer before it starts to soften. He even smiles, just a little--small and tired and relieved, and it changes his face so completely Ronan hardly recognizes him. 

“Thank God,” he says, “Thank you.” With a little difficulty, encumbered by the wing he’s still cradling against his side, he gets to his feet. “I’ll find a way to repay you for it, I swear. I’ll fix the window, I’ll do work around the farm. I’ll find someplace else to stay so I don’t impose. Thank you.”

Ronan isn’t sure what to do with the earnest gratitude being directed at him, so naturally he bristles. “Fucking relax. Let’s try and fix you first before you start falling over yourself.” 

Adam has nothing to say in response. He only smiles again, and then Ronan wants to punch something.


	2. she's fine as dandelions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fifty dollars is more than she’s ever spent on a single article of clothing aside from her Aglionby uniform, but she doesn’t want to leave it here and end up going to someone who won’t care for where the dress came from, who it had belonged to. Fifty dollars is a good week of tips, only a few days of skipped meals between paychecks.
> 
> “Are there dressing rooms here?” she asks. She’s never needed to know before.

Anna never had the luxury of being pretty, or doing pretty things. Pragmatism generally won out--pretty things were expensive things, and cheap things were the tacky kind of pretty that Anna neither cared for nor impressed her Aglionby classmates. She got by without them, even though she desperately wanted them--good, brand-name makeup that wouldn’t irritate her eyes or skin, a real cashmere sweater, stud earrings that weren’t plated nickel and plastic rhinestones, a designer handbag and real leather shoes, regular manicures. 

Prom always seemed like one of those expensive, pretty things she’d never get to have. It was one of those things that Gansey got to have, that Roisin chose not to have. Anna trailed along with Gansey to the dress stores, to the designer outlets, because Gansey was trying to make it seem like she was shopping for herself, as if the moment the date of the dance had been announced that a custom gown from one of her mother’s friends hadn’t been ordered. 

“I heard the other day that there’s a charity drive at the mall for used gowns,” Gansey said, as if Anna hasn’t also heard the radio commercial several times a day at work. “Maybe you could go through that?”

“Good idea,” Blue said, “Have her go and pick out a dress someone else from Aglionby donated last year, that won’t be embarrassing at all.”

Gansey flushed, deeply chastised because she hadn’t thought of that the way Anna and Blue had. 

It was a relief when Blue asked her to go with him to some thrift stores so he could start finding what he wanted to make his suit out of. He didn’t push Anna to look at anything, or try to talk her into trying anything on even if she found something she liked. 

“Is Roisin going, or just me and Gansey and Hana?”

Anna shrugs and looks away from a rack of horrendously ugly bridesmaid dresses. “No. She said she’d rather fall down an elevator shaft than wear a fancy dress.”

“They wouldn’t force her to wear a dress, would they?” Blue frowns a little and takes yet another suit jacket off a hanger to examine it more closely. “You think she’s just saying that so you don’t feel worse?”

Anna assumed as much, but she also knew that Roisin was a romantic under her bullish exterior and probably wanted to go with her girlfriend. “Probably. Maybe. You know how she is.”

“I could make you something to wear,” Blue says. “A dress is easier than a suit.”

“I couldn’t ask you to do that.” 

“I’m offering,” he replies.

“Thank you, but no.” Anna pulls the length of her ponytail over her shoulder and plays with the ends as she wanders deeper into the store. She knows this particular store well, as it’s where she’s bought many of her other clothes--she’s pretty sure the jeans and sneakers she’s wearing are from here, so she leaves Blue in the men’s section so she can sulk in peace. She’s looking at yet another rack of dresses when Blue appears at her side again, so suddenly it startles her because he’d approached on her deaf side.

“Sorry,” he says, distractedly, as he reaches around her to pull the skirt of a dress out to get a better look at it. “This is Persephone’s. Aunt Jimi donated a bunch of her old things no one had any use for a while ago, but I didn’t know where she brought everything.”

Anna takes the dress off the rack. It’s not a Persephone-like thing, not the Persephone she’d known, but knowing that it was once hers makes sense--the style was vintage when it had been new, if it had even come to be Persephone’s while it was still new, and the cream colored silk and powdery blue accents were very like her. 

“It looks like a wedding dress,” Anna whispers, strangely affected. When she looks at Blue, she sees that he’s a little glassy eyed. 

“It might have been,” Blue says. His voice is soft and he touches the sash gently. “She had a husband at one point.” He finds the price tag tucked and scowls at it. “It’s worth more than fifty bucks, even third-hand.”

Anna takes the tag from him to see it for herself. Fifty dollars, in red marker ink on a tag loosely attached to the sash with a little bit of string. Fifty dollars is more than she’s ever spent on a single article of clothing aside from her Aglionby uniform, but she doesn’t want to leave it here and end up going to someone who won’t care for where the dress came from, who it had belonged to. Fifty dollars is a good week of tips, only a few days of skipped meals between paychecks.

“Are there dressing rooms here?” she asks. She’s never needed to know before.

\---

 

It is becoming very apparent that, after almost an hour of watching tutorials online, that Anna has no clue how to put on makeup. According to all these videos, she’s missing a lot of important steps in her makeup routine. It all seems so impractical, so wasteful of time and product, but when she glances up and sees Persephone’s dress hanging on the back of her bathroom door, she knows she can’t half-ass this without feeling like a failure. 

Anna’s entire collection consists of a several-years-old palette of eyeshadow in colors she’d never actually wear and can’t remember buying, a barely used tube of BB cream, a mascara she’s never opened, some mostly dried out foundation that isn’t even a match for her skintone, a cheap eyeliner pencil that never stays on, and a tinted lip gloss a friend gave her in middle school. 

She squints at the back of the BB cream and wonders what that even means, and if she can use it in place of foundation. One video told her to set her makeup with aerosol hairspray, which just seems like a terrible idea, rather than buying an expensive setting spray. Another told her she needed highlighter powder and matte eyeshadow palettes with suggestive names. Someone else suggested some kind of liquid lipstick some celebrity Anna’s never heard of has released. 

With a little flare of temper, she throws the mascara tube at her mattress, and the lack of bounce is incredibly unsatisfying. 

She misses Noelle. She would’ve understood. 

With a heavy sigh, she clicks a different tab to look at hairstyles that look like they absolutely can’t be done on yourself at home without a lot of tools and products she doesn’t have. 

This is supposed to all be a surprise for Roisin, and Anna wants it to go perfectly. Roisin just thinks she’s been manipulated into going with Gansey and Hana and Blue, without Anna. It’s not a lie, Anna has to keep reminding herself, because when that arrangement had been made she still hadn’t had the dress, because Blue hadn’t finished taking it in for her. By that point, it only seemed right to continue the charade just to get to see the look on Roisin’s face. 

A bang downstairs tells her that Roisin is here. She gets up and hides the dress in her closet and clicks away from the overly complicated braid she’d been trying to learn. She’s barely positioned casually on the bed again when Roisin slams the door open, because she slams everything.

“Parrish,” she says, instead of saying hello like a normal person. She narrows her eyes. “Your hair’s a fucking nest.”

Anna combs through it with her fingertips, wincing as she catches a few snags. “It’s been known to happen.”

Roisin toes out of her chunky, expensive sandals. “That’s what happens when you have hair down to your ass.”

“Serves me right. Why haven’t I shaved my head, again?”

“Because,” Roisin says. She kneels down on the mattress and pushes a lock of Anna’s hair behind her ear, eyes bright under her dark makeup. “You look good with hair down to your ass.”

Anna laughs and pulls Roisin to her, and Roisin lets herself be pulled very willingly. Her mouth is always so soft, but Anna feels the edge of her teeth as she smiles and puts her hands on Anna’s scalp.

“I love your hair,” she says. Her fingertips and nails feel amazing on Anna’s scalp. “It’s so silky.”

“It’s so fine. I can’t do anything with it.”

Roisin tugs on her hair a little. “Just take the compliment, Annie.”

“Thank you,” Anna says. She’s still learning to accept them when they’re given, because they still always feel like they’re supposed to cost her something.

\---

The night of the dance, Anna arrives at Fox Way before everyone else. She rides her bike over and leaves it in the garage beside Blue’s, where it’ll be hidden from view when Roisin and Gansey and Hana arrive in an hour and a half. Blue greets her at the door, still in his leggings and crop-top, his longish hair clipped into place. In a sideways kind of way, Anna can imagine him as a girl, and she thinks he’d be very pretty if things were different.

“Are you nervous?” he asks her around a mouthful of yogurt. She follows him up the stairs from the front door to the kitchen, careful to not let her ratty dufflebag come into contact with anything she passes. She’s afraid of breaking something and incurring either a thousand years of bad luck or Calla’s fury.

“Yeah. Very. I haven’t been able to eat anything all day, I keep feeling like I’ll be sick.”

“You probably will be if you don’t eat.” He’s probably not wrong. “Have a yogurt or something before I help you with your hair. You’ll feel worse just sitting there doing nothing.”

Anna doesn’t like yogurt, but she goes to the fridge to retrieve one. It’s a Greek style one flavored with honey, and it’s actually pretty good. Creamier and more filling than any other yogurt she’s ever had, but she has a feeling it’s going to be too expensive for her to keep in the minifridge in her apartment. 

“You still want me to braid part of it?” he asks her after they’re in his room.

“Yeah. Like that picture I sent you the other day, if you can.”

He nods and moves a pile of fabric off his desk chair so she can sit. “I’ll do that first and the curls second, it’ll be easier.”

The braids, though complicated looking to Anna and impossible to execute with her limited experience, come together quickly. After he’s done with them, Blue starts to curl her hair with a tool he borrowed from one of his cousins that Anna has only heard about and has never seen before, and it takes an excruciatingly long time to get her fine hair to cooperate before the curls prove they can hold.

From somewhere else in the house, Maura calls for Blue, and he leaves her in his room. He shuts the door behind himself, probably to give Anna privacy so she can change while he’s gone, but she takes the first few minutes to apply her makeup. The result is unimpressive to her, inexperienced looking and subtle, but it would take too long to wash it off and start over. It’ll be dark in the banquet hall where the dance is being held, and no one will notice, or so she hopes.

It feels illicit to strip out of her clothes in Blue’s room, worse to stand in it undressed for a moment, staring at Persephone’s old dress, which he’d finished altering for her a week ago. It’s so delicate looking, so pale and pretty. It’s not an Anna Parrish thing. But she wants it to be. She wishes she’d thought to paint her nails as she steps into it 

The commotion downstairs means that everyone else is here, which means Blue will be needing his room back soon. She zips up the side, adjusts the straps, twists the skirt side to side to make sure everything’s in place, exactly where it should be. She slips on her secondhand shoes and paces around Blue’s bed to make sure she’s steady in them; she’s been trying to practice for weeks whenever she’s had the time, and she’s starting to get the hang of it. 

When she looks up, she sees her reflection in the mirror hanging on the back of the door, and she doesn’t recognize herself. Not in the way she usually can’t, when she can’t tell if the face she sees is her own or that it doesn’t look quite like she thinks she does. She smooths her hands over the front of the dress. She looks pretty.

It’s a little overwhelming.

Her reverie is broken when there’s a knock on the door. Blue asks if he can come in, and she isn’t sure how she responds, only that he can. His entire face lights up brilliantly and she feels her face get warm.

“You look amazing,” he tells her. He takes both of her hands in his. She’s taller than him in these shoes, and it’s disorienting. “Roisin’s gonna have a heart attack when she sees you. They’re downstairs, they all seemed unhappy you weren’t here yet.”

“You think so?” She just saw herself and she can hardly believe it. She almost feels like a princess, which is a stupid thought, but she can’t shake it every time she looks down and sees herself. “Should I wait for you or should I go now?”

He grins, and she knows which option he prefers. She smiles back and goes to wait in the hallway.

\---

“How avante-garde,” Hana says as Blue comes downstairs in his custom, patchwork suit. He dyed it all the same shade of black which was apparently a pain in the ass that took hours to do, so the different textures and patterns are subtle in less than direct light. He opted to match his shirt to Gansey’s dress and his tie to Hana’s. He looks handsomer than Anna’s ever seen him. 

“Oh Dick.” Gansey sounds very appreciative. “You’re dashing.”

“Ugh,” Roisin groans. “You fucking heteros are disgusting me.”

Hana clucks her tongue, and Anna can see her wagging her finger from the landing above them. “None of that, Sheena, you don’t know a single one of those.”

“Declan doesn’t count,” Gansey adds.

“Whatever,” Roisin says. Anna sees her move to look out the window next to the door. “When did Parrish say she’d be here?”

At this, Blue looks up and gives Anna a thumbs up. Hana notices and glances up, nearly doing a double take before gasping and covering her mouth. Gansey and Roisin, like the two-headed creature they are, look up at the same time.

“Oh, Annie,” Gansey says. Her eyes are glassy and she clasps her hands in front of her mouth. Blue puts his arm around her shoulders, and her bright aqua dress nearly glows in contrast. He looks as proud as she does. “You’re positively radiant.”

A little weakly, Anna says, “No one says stuff like that, Gansey.”

Roisin’s shock melts into one of the truest smiles Anna’s ever seen on her, and she steps around Hana to meet Anna on the landing. Her suit is a deep navy blue that makes her pale skin glow and her eyes shine brighter than stars. Her mouth, usually bare compared to her signature smoky eyes, is charcoal black. 

“You clean up nice,” Roisin tells her. 

Anna puts her hand on Roisin’s cheek. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

If she thought felt like a princess upstairs, she feels even more like one when Roisin pulls her into her arms and kisses her. She feels swept off her feet. Even next to Hana’s runway dress and Gansey’s bespoke gown and their collective thousands of dollars in makeup and jewelry and expensive shoes and clutch handbags, Anna doesn't think she’s ever felt so beautiful as she does when she sees that Roisin is still smiling at her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Normally I'm not big on Rule 63 stuff, but the idea of DFAB Adam struggling with the expense and constant effort of femininity wouldn't let me go once it occurred to me.


	3. hooked on a star

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despite my tangle of emotions, I feel myself looking down at him, a spoiled brat who wants to play war hero instead of being content to stay home and party like other Upland kids. His nice, probably real leather bag and its fullness, his tattoo and facial augments, the way he fills out his uniform. I am abruptly repulsed by him and regret thinking he was handsome.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve never written Adam’s POV in the first person before, and I recently started re-reading Autoeuphoric‘s [_Some of Us_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1114296), so I decided to take a whack at killing two birds with one stone: a one-shot set in the same universe (which I’ve wanted to do forever, because omg it’s so fantastic and immersive and seriously go read it even if you don’t know anything about Free!), and an attempt at writing Adam’s first person POV.

The vast emptiness of space is strangely comforting after the smoggy congestion of Lowland, but I can’t shake the knowledge that, under my feet, isn’t solid earth. Platform 6 is designed to simulate the gravity of Earth and it’s not as though we can feel it moving, but the drone of grav drives and engines and the hover strats suspending some of the upper walkways makes it impossible to forget that I’m tens of thousands of miles from home. 

When it really, about ten hours into my arrival on the Platform, I find a secluded observation deck and cry with relief, with disbelief. I never have to go back. I’m free. After years of waiting and hoping and bleeding for the chance, I’m finally free. 

The sound of footsteps down the hall makes me stop almost instantly--I would not be here if I wasn’t good at hiding my emotions, and I will not survive here if I don’t continue to bury them. I scrub my hands over my face and take a few deep breaths, and when the footsteps stop on the deck, I don’t turn around. This newcomer comes closer to the window, almost like they’re joining me, but they keep a few meters of distance between us. 

I can’t help but glance over when they step into my line of sight. It’s a boy, around my age, in Combat black and red, like me, but he wears the uniform better than I can ever hope to, broad-shouldered and fit where I’m narrow and underfed. His head is shaved and I can see a tattoo peeking out from under his collar. Even though he’s not posturing, something about him badly intimidates me and I have to look away. I am painfully aware that it’s very likely he knows I was crying.

I can feel him looking at me. It makes me fidget. 

“Can I help you?” I ask, in a tone that should tell him I have no interest in helping him with anything ever. 

He looks away, back out the window. His eyes are augmented and they reflect against the glass, aggressively blue. “Just wondering who fucked up and put you in that uniform.”

I wondered the same thing when I received my assignment weeks ago. How anyone could have thought it made sense to assign me, of all people, to Combat is baffling. Whoever made that call probably doesn’t deserve their job.

I don’t know why, but I laugh a little. I feel him look at me again. “I know. It feels like some kind of joke. I was hoping for Recon, or Starforce mechanic, or anything else.”

“I wanted to fly,” he admits. The admission that he’s not in the branch that he’d been hoping for either warms me. We both look at each other at the same time, and I realize he’s an Uplander, an Elite; he was with the one with the posh, old-fashioned name who took an inexplicable shine to me on the shuttle. I should’ve noticed right away between his casual grace and the arrogant tilt of his chin, the clarity of his skin. His features are so sharp and savagely handsome they were probably bought, not born. 

I envy him. If I don’t die in the war, I want to be like him, someday. It’s supposed to be impossible to move up in the world when you’re born as poor and miserable as I was, but I want to be the one to break the mould. I want to be one of the few Lowlanders to graduate from the Academy after I finish my tour of duty, go on to study engineering and try to make the slums a less miserable place to live.

Elites like him don’t get assigned to Combat. They’re placed safely away from the front lines in Research and Development, unlike the cannon fodder Lowlanders like me. 

I wonder if there was a mistake when he was assigned, too. 

A few long moments pass in silence. It’s not companionable because we don’t know each other, but it isn’t horrible. It’s almost nice. In the dim light and our dark uniforms, I almost forget he’s even here as I go back to staring out the window at the void. 

I wonder if my parents even realize where I am right now, if they even care. They’re as free of their burden, me, as I am of mine, of them. Even being glad to be away from the hovel we lived in, even knowing the immediate danger of continuing to exist in my father’s presence is long passed, I find myself worrying about my mother. She doesn’t deserve my worry, I know, but still, I can’t help but wonder if they’ll be able to survive without my income, or if he’ll manage to drink himself to death or piss off the wrong person in a bar brawl, if she’ll end up on the streets because she can’t contribute to the finances anymore.

My fingers twist together before me. I don’t notice I’m doing it until I feel the Elite looking at me again. 

“Are you okay?” he asks. This seems like a weird question and I force myself to look away from the stars and at him. 

“I’m fine,” I lie. I don’t even realize I’m doing it. It’s as familiar to me as my own name, as ‘stop’, as ‘please’, as ‘I don’t have anything else, I swear.’ 

He looks troubled, his augmented eyes unnerving with their glow. “You’re crying, man.”

I quickly look away from him and wipe my face with the sleeves of my Combat jacket. “I’m fine,” I say again, knowing he can tell I’m lying. I lie like second nature, most of the time I don’t even realize I’m doing it, but it’s one of my few survival mechanisms I’ve kept all these years. It may be one of the few reasons I’m still alive and not begging or worse in some gutter somewhere.

With his eyes still on me, I feel him sit on the bench beside me. He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and when he does speak, he says, “What’s your berth?”

I know my berth number, but I haven’t checked in yet. I still have my third- or fourth-hand bag and my few allowed possessions with me. I imagine it’s hard for some people to decide what they’re going to bring with them to Platform 6, but I had so few things already I essentially got to bring them all. My bag is hardly even weighted down and looks mostly empty compared to the one he has with him. 

Despite my tangle of emotions, I feel myself looking down at him, a spoiled brat who wants to play war hero instead of being content to stay home and party like other Upland kids. His nice, probably real leather bag and its fullness, his tattoo and facial augments, the way he fills out his uniform. I am abruptly repulsed by him and regret thinking he was handsome. 

I stand and take my light bag with me, and I leave him alone on the ob deck without a word. He doesn’t follow me. I’m glad, because the last thing I need is to have this bastard follow after me.

My berthmate hasn’t checked in yet, either, when I arrive at 1405. This suits me just fine, as it leaves me time to unpack my things and claim a bunk. The room is small and lit with white lights that make my eyes hurt, as if they’re too bright and too dark at the same time. I have a headache before I even have a chance to claim my bunk and start unpacking.

A decade old holopad I saved up for for over a year. A rubber ball I like to play with when I’m thinking. A photograph of a car I hope to own someday. A toy mech I had treasured as a kid. My hearing aid and its batteries. I don’t normally wear it and I probably won’t have use for it much longer, but it comforts me to have it. A key to a lockbox I buried in a scrap yard I hope no one ever finds.

The door swishes open behind me, and I turn to meet my roommate.

It’s the Elite from the ob deck, and he seems just as surprised to see me as I am to see him.


	4. the world and all the sorrows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I thought I lost you,” Adam says after a while, voice barely above a whisper, so low he can probably barely hear himself. “After everything that happened, watching it trying to unmake you, it was like watching the world end.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon compliance and two days’ worth of prompts in one fill? What madness is this?

The events of the last twenty-four hours will never stop being unbelievable, even in the grand scheme of unbelievable things that have happened to them all over the last two years. They catpile in the middle of Fox Way’s living room because they can’t stand to be apart, until, sometime in the smallest hours of the morning, Ronan breaks away because he cannot bear to be with them all anymore. 

He finds himself in the kitchen, staring at the bright green clock on the stove. 1:19 am. It’s been a little over a day since his mother died, not even twelve hours since he and Matthew and Opal were almost unmade. 

The clock on the stove at the Barns has a red display. Somehow the opposite color on this one is the worst thing he’s seen yet. He turns away from it and sits on the floor where he can’t see the clock change to read 1:21. 

The door slides open, the soft sound of footsteps and not the light clatter of hooves surprising. He looks up. In the sickly and dim green light, Adam’s skin looks radioactive and his eyes are black. He rubs his eye with the back of his hand and sits down, his movements slow and graceless in the way of the recently awoken. Ronan wonders if he somehow disturbed Adam’s sleep when he got up, or if Adam had never quite slipped far enough under after everything to have just needed an excuse to disentangle himself, too.

It’s a deeply black and moonless night outside, so the green stove clock is the only light in the room. He doesn’t see Adam reach for his hand, but he turns his wrist to accept it when Adam’s fingertips find his wrist. Adam’s hand is slender in his own, with callouses and prominent bone and tendons. When Ronan rubs his thumb over the back of Adam’s hand, he feels the veins shifting under thin skin.

They sit in silence, listening to the house settle and the cold November wind outside and each other breathing for endless, eternal minutes. 

“I thought I lost you,” Adam says after a while, voice barely above a whisper, so low he can probably barely hear himself. “After everything that happened, watching it trying to unmake you, it was like watching the world end.” 

Ronan grips his hand a little tighter, and Adam tightens his grip in kind. It almost hurts, almost. But not quite. He can feel Adam’s eyes on him without seeing them. He says, “It felt like the world was ending.”

Adam leans his head on Ronan’s shoulder and one of his knees bumps against Ronan’s. “I’m sorry. About your mom. About trying to kill you. About the demon. About everything.”

Telling Adam to stop apologizing won’t do any good, and he doesn’t totally realize that he’s doing it in the first place. It’s not exhausting coming from him the way it is when other people do it, but it does do something strange, too.

He presses his face against Adam’s hair and sobs, just once, very softly. Adam’s other hand covers Ronan’s, holding it between his own, and he kisses Ronan’s shoulder. 

For having not received a lot of comfort or affection in his life, Adam is very good at giving it, at least the kind Ronan needs as he purges himself of the day’s traumas. He’s also better at masking his own catharsis and it takes Ronan several minutes to realize Adam’s crying, too. 

They wake there the next morning, stiff and sore and with aching heads, hands still clasped together. It feels like one of the few good things that have come out of the last day.


End file.
